Three steps to transform your anxiety into a superpower that will improve your life
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Dr Wendy Suzuki didn’t think she suffered from anxiety – at least not much. Until she began working on her latest book, Anxiety Is Your Superpower.
“I learned I’ve a lot more anxiety than I’d like to admit. I discovered I like to hide it from myself and everybody else,” she says on the phone from New York.
While she’s not nearly as shy as she used to be, she does have social anxiety. “I’m still a little uncomfortable in social situations – not when I’m talking about work, but when I have to be myself for friends, or potential friends. And I have money worries. Am I spending too much? OMG am I going to have enough?” Family health is another anxiety. “My father passed away with Alzheimer’s disease. My mom is getting more forgetful. I’m a neuroscientist – I know what happens in the brain!”
So it’s not just her personal anxieties that qualify her to write a book that’s subtitled Using Anxiety to Think Better, Feel Better And Do Better. Suzuki is a professor of neural science and psychology in the Center for Neural Science at New York University and a celebrated international authority on neuroplasticity and mental health. The book is a timely arrival for World Mental Health Day, this Sunday.
From a global pandemic to climate change there’s no doubt the past 18 months have been stressful. Suzuki points out that, even pre-pandemic, 90% of people in the US had some degree of anxiety. Here, a paper published in the Irish Medical Journal reported that one in five of us had “significantly increased psychological distress – anxiety and depression” due to combined effect of Covid-19 and restrictions.
The words we use to describe how anxiety makes us feel – ‘keyed up’, ‘on edge’, ‘tightly wound’ – tell their own story: anxiety is not a very pleasant emotion. We want to be rid of it. But Suzuki is not “trying to kick anxiety out the door”. Anxiety originally evolved to help us, she says. “It warned us against danger. If you were a woman with a baby 2.5m years ago, the crack of a twig could be a predator. It caused instant anxiety, which immediately deployed the fight or flight response – increasing heart rate, respiration and blood flow to muscles, and your ability to run. Without this fast-acting system, you could be eaten.”
Even today, anxiety still works to warn us – external threats continue to exist. “Living in New York, I regularly have to jump away from traffic that comes close,” says Suzuki. The conflict, she says, comes with our modern society, whereby we’re locked into an endless cycle of stress, sleeplessness, and worry. There’s no reprieve – the anxiety doesn’t dissipate when the predator danger or traffic threat is gone. “There’s lots to cause anxiety – your taxes are due, there’s another weird weather thing and you’re worried about global warming. The anxieties come constantly, so there’s no recovery from them.”
Yet, if we approach anxiety as something to avoid/get rid of/dampen down, we miss an opportunity to improve our lives, argues Suzuki, who believes anxiety is in fact a key component of our ability to live optimally. She says she has put herself on a mission to find the wisdom in anxiety.
The book isn’t for those who suffer clinical anxiety, which Suzuki says is a truly debilitating condition. “It prevents you from working, from having normal human relationships. For this you need medical intervention.” She wrote the book for those experiencing the lower ranges of anxiety. “It offers tools to turn the volume down on anxiety, and to think about it in a different way – as valuable and protective, an emotion that can help you with key situations in your life. This is a big mind-shift.”
But first we need to get comfortable with anxiety, to sit with it. “By simply sitting with the discomfort, you do two things. You get accustomed to the feeling and realise you can ‘survive’ it. And you give yourself time and space in your brain to make a more conscious decision about how to act or respond.” And, says Suzuki, when we more consciously decide how we’re going to respond, we’re using our anxiety as a tool to supercharge our brain. “This is exactly how a new, more positive neural pathway is established.” So how does Suzuki suggest we make anxiety work for us? It’s a three-step journey:
“Learn how to turn the volume down on anxiety. Acknowledge you’re never going to get rid of it. But you don’t want it too high.”
One way to dial down the jitters is by consciously breathing deeply for long durations. “This activates the part of the nervous system that deals with stress, decreasing heart rate, respiration and diverting blood away from the muscles and to our digestive systems. Breathing is one of the oldest forms of meditation – and everybody can do it.”
Moving your body is another way to turn the volume down. “The effects of physical activity on the brain have been studied for years in our labs in NYU. It stimulates the release of a wide range of brain neurochemicals including dopamine and serotonin. Physical activity gives your body a lovely bubble bath of neurochemicals.” (Suzuki’s TED Talk, ‘The Brain-changing Benefits of Exercise’, has reached over three million views: exa.mn/Brain-Gym)
Once anxiety stops being so draining in your everyday life, turn inwards and try to understand why you’ve got this uncomfortable feeling.
“What is underlying it? What does it tell you about your value system? The sources of our anxiety are great pointers toward what we value in life. Perhaps that worry about money is a reminder of how much we value financial stability – or the concern about privacy is a reminder we need sufficient alone time.”
Understand the gifts of anxiety – and what these can be for you. Suzuki devotes separate chapters to each of anxiety’s six ‘superpowers’: Resilience, Flow, Activist Mindset, Productivity, Compassion and Creativity.
She credits her own anxiety with giving her two of her favourite superpowers: productivity and empathy/compassion. A lawyer she interviewed confided she was very highly paid because of her anxiety. This struck a chord with Suzuki.
“For this lawyer, anxiety came in the form of a ‘what if’ list – what if the other side has this argument. I had this too – what if I haven’t done that piece of work well enough.”
The lawyer told her that she turned her ‘what if’ list into a ‘to do’ list – she moved into action instead of staying in worry and uncertainty. Suzuki started doing this more explicitly – acting on her concerns. “And because anxiety evolved to make us take action, by taking mental action I decreased my anxiety and increased my productivity.”
Suzuki says her social anxiety gifted her empathy. “I’ve had years of anxiety in the classroom, being a shy, awkward wallflower of a student for years, who wanted to ask questions in class, but didn’t out of fear of being wrong.”
Now a university professor, Suzuki realised she was unconsciously reaching out to students like she had been. “I’d come to lectures early and leave late. I wanted to make sure students who were too scared to ask questions in class had an opportunity to do so.”
Suzuki says she now has a “deep and much more open relationship with anxiety”. Her goal is not just to get rid of it, but to learn from it. “It’s a friend, not a warm and woolly one – a prickly friend, an informational one.”
*Anxiety Is Your Superpower, Wendy Suzuki, €21.
*St Patrick’s Mental Health Services has launched an interactive online programme of wellbeing events, workshops and curated content, shared over the course of four weeks, to encourage everyone to make their mental health a priority and focus on their wellbeing. The programme runs until October 24. Visit https://www.walkinmyshoes.ie/campaigns/wimslive.
Suzuki says we can actively choose to use anxiety as a catalyst for change, to reframe it from being a problem to being a lesson.
Doing this means developing an ‘activist mindset’. She points to research from Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, who demonstrated that it is possible to develop this kind of growth mindset. It is a four-step process:
- Learn how to hear the voice of the fixed mindset – the voice that says there is a limit to what you can achieve in any situation.
- Consciously recognise that you have a choice: to listen to this limiting belief in your own power – or listen to a growth mindset voice, one that says you have control over your own stress response.
- Actively talk back to the negative, self-limiting voice with a positive, growth-oriented voice. Instead of ‘I’ll never get through this. I just can’t take it anymore’, try ‘This is a pretty stressful situation, but I know it will pass. I can do x, y, or z, which I know will make me feel better and more grounded. Then I can figure out my next steps’.
- Take action. This means figuring out what to do. With this, you’re walking the talk and acting on the knowledge that a mistake/obstacle/stress response is simply information that informs your thoughts and actions.
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